Herein, related art is described to facilitate understanding of the invention. Related art labeled “prior art” is admitted prior art; related art not labeled “prior art” is not admitted prior art.
Managing a data center or other large computer system can be quite daunting. Such systems can include a great variety of computer resources to manage, including stand-alone computers, rack-systems, blade systems, and computer complexes that can be partitioned in a number of ways including into hard and virtual partitions. A computer can host one or more virtual machines, and resources can be grouped into shared resource domains and high-availability clusters. To administrate such a computer system involves keeping track of a large number of resources of many types and many possible relationships to each other.
In the figures, referents ending in “i” or “j” refer to representations of objects, which are referred to by the same numbers, but without the “i” or “j”.